Ducky, I Shrunk the Team
by Channel D
Summary: After a long period of squabbling, larger concerns force Gibbs' team to put aside their little differences and work together. A not-very-serious journey into pseudo-science. One-shot, written for the NFA Teamwork challenge.


**Ducky, I Shrunk the Team**

**by channelD**

_written for_: the NFA _Teamwork_ challenge  
_rating_: K plus  
_genre_: humor, strangeness

- - - - -

_disclaimer_: I own nothing of NCIS

- - - - -

_12:57 p.m., the squad room:_

"Give me back my thumb drive, Tony, or I'll…"

"Or you'll _what_, McGeek?"

"Would you two _shut up_?! I am trying to _work_ here."

"Got a special on head slaps today," said Gibbs, breezing in. "Who wants to go first?' That quieted them down. The team had been at each other's throats for days now. "I need you all…behaving…in Abby's lab. _Now."_

- - - - -

_1:15 p.m., Abby's lab:_

Abby's lab was a reasonably roomy place, or at least it was when Abby wasn't tearing through it on her roller blades, which she still did, at times, despite being told by the bosses not to.

But she was not here this afternoon, having a court appearance. They couldn't wait for Abby to return. A case needed its evidence combed quickly, so the assailants could be found before they struck again. Gibbs, Tony, Tim and Ziva would somehow do the work of one Abby, and get the case moving.

"Bring that slide over here," Gibbs directed. "I can still remember how to work a microscope…although I've never seen one this complicated." He stared, uncomprehending, at some of the fancy-looking parts of the microscope.

"That part _is_ new, Gibbs," said Ziva. "Abby told me there were a couple of equipment attachments that she has added."

Gibbs only shrugged. A microscope was a microscope. He turned to look at something else, and his elbow banged one of the attachments…

…causing it to swivel, and come on…

…its faintly yellow beam of light sweeping across Ziva, Tony and Tim…

When Gibbs turned back, his team was out of sight. "Hey!" he called in irritation. "Get back in here!"

Angrily, he strode toward the doorway, and out into the hall.

- - - - -

Tony and Tim dived for cover under a table as the enormous, flat object dropped hard where they'd been standing. Ziva stifled a yell; they made it with inches to spare…

…which was pretty good, seeing as they were now less than two inches tall.

- - - - -

"Okay, tell me I haven't gone insane," Tony panted from the safety of the table. "How did the room get so big? And what happened to Gibbs? I don't see him anywhere."

"I think that was his shoe that almost flattened us," Tim wheezed. "The room didn't grow; we've shrunk. I think."

Ziva nodded. "It is evident from the dimensions of things. I saw Gibbs bump into Abby's microscope. We must have been hit with a shrink ray."

"…That is _so_ not good," Tony remarked. The others nodded.

- - - - -

_1:32 p.m._

Gibbs came back into the room, having not seen his team in the hallway. He looked both annoyed and perplexed. His footsteps slightly shook the floor, and the three tiny teammates had to hold onto a table leg to keep from bouncing.

"Boss!" Tony and Tim called. "Gibbs!" called Ziva.

"He doesn't hear us!" Tony said.

"Try it in unison. Say 'Gibbs'," Ziva directed. "On three. One…two.."

"_Gibbs!!!"_ They yelled at the top of their voices.

Gibbs stopped suddenly, and listened. What was that strange sound? Almost like a kitten's mew. He wouldn't put it above Abby to have an animal hidden away in here somewhere, despite the regulations.

"_Gibbs!!!"_ They yelled again.

"This isn't working," Tony said, frustrated.

"Yeah, well, even if we can get his attention, it's not like he knows a whole lot of science and can make this right," Tim sighed.

"And I suppose you can, McGenius?" Tony angrily shoved Tim, who shoved him back.

Ziva got an idea, and pulled out her cell phone…which was now the size of a period at the end of a sentence, but which seemed normal to her. She dialed.

A rumble of thunder shook through them. "Hell of a ringtone the boss has," Tony gasped. But it was the booming that must has been Gibbs' voice, answering his phone that knocked them off their feet.

A hand over her free ear, Ziva begged, "Softly, Gibbs; please. I can explain…"

"Ziva?! Where did you three go? We have work to do!!" The voice through the phone sounded normal; it was only the too-close-by voice that still hurt to hear.

"We are under the table," said Ziva. "And please…speak as softly as you can."

"Under the—??" His curiosity overcoming his disbelief, Gibbs crouched and looked under the table. And then disbelief took over again, and he rubbed his eyes.

They certainly looked like his team, these five-centimeter-high people (Ziva was closer to four centimeters) waving to him.

"You accidentally hit something on the microscope," Ziva said, trying to keep her irritation form showing. "It made us very small."

"Link to a conference call," Tim commanded his colleagues. "It's the only way we can all talk with Gibbs."

"Good idea," said Tony, "and maybe putting on earwigs will lessen the background talk."

Gibbs was still staring. Finally, he got up and sprinted for the video phone. "Ducky!" he bellowed. "Need you in Abby's lab, _immediately_! But…when you come in, watch where you step."

"All right, Jethro, but whatever is the matter?"

Gibbs gulped. "I shrunk the team." He could hear Jimmy's peals of laughter in the background.

- - - - -

_1: 45 p.m.:_

When Ducky (and Jimmy) arrived at the lab, they found Gibbs carefully, slowly, raising a credit card into the air; tiny Tony sitting aboard it, in the center. Gibbs never took his eyes off the card, ignoring Ducky's and Jimmy's entrance. As he slowly set the card down on the table and Tony jumped off it, Gibbs finally straightened up.

Ducky blinked. "Good heavens! And are Ziva and Timothy…"

"They're under the table," Gibbs said softly. "I haven't brought them up yet. Keep your voice down. Our normal speaking level hurts their ears."

"I—I daresay it must!" Ducky was flabbergasted, and peered at the miniature Tony. "So perfectly formed, in fine detail," he murmured. It was clear that he didn't believe his eyes.

Tony marched over to where Ducky's stethoscope dangled over the table. Grabbing the chest piece, he shouted into it, "I'm not some stupid action figure, Ducky!"

Ducky winced. "Of course not, dear boy. My apologies."

Gibbs added Ducky and Jimmy to the conference call line, and then bent down to give Tim a ride up on his credit card. "No, one of you at a time," Gibbs said as Ziva tried to climb on, too. "I don't want anything to unbalance this…" He knew that for a tiny figure, a fall from this height would be fatal.

"Let me help, Agent Gibbs," Jimmy offered, and grabbed a spoon from a nearby counter. He gave Ziva a nice ride in it up to the table top.

"That's it…don't handle them," Ducky cautioned. "Their little bones would break so easily in our grasp."

"Ducky, how is this possible?!" Gibbs demanded. "You just can't scale living beings up or down like this!"

"No, but evidently, you have, Jethro," Ducky said with a knowing gleam in his eyes. "Tell me what you did, and we'll try to figure out a way to get them back to normal."

"You hear that, McGee?" Tony said, poking his teammate. "Even Ducky acknowledges that you're not normal."

Tim frowned, and tried to ignore Tony. "Well, at least we're safe for now."

"Safe, and fully clothed. I'd have hated to not have our clothes shrunk with us," Tony remarked. He grinned. "Although Ziva…"

"Stop that!" she snapped. "I can still kill you eighteen ways…"

"With a paperclip? I don't think that, at your size, you can even _lift_ a paperclip, Zee-vah."

Gibbs had explained what he knew of what had happened, with Ziva supplying details. "No, I _don't_ want to try the beam on them again. They might disappear from sight," Gibbs said firmly.

"We'll have to wait for Abby to get back, then," said Ducky.

"I can try searching online," Jimmy offered. "There must be documentation for that hardware _somewhere_…" He went over to one of the room's computers.

"McGee?" asked Gibbs. "Figure a way out of your mess."

"Boss, all I know are computers, and I'm too small to work one now," Tim complained. "Abby—"

"So much for your precious degrees from Johns Hopkins, etc.," Tony sneered.

"I haven't seen _you_ come up with an idea," Tim retorted.

Ziva got between the two of them before they could start shoving. "We must stop bickering and work _together,"_ she said. "I think that, together, we can do this."

Tim and Tony glared at each other; doubt clearly on their minds.

- - - - -

_2:51 p.m.:_

Jimmy was having no luck. Even though Tim kept feeding him search term suggestions, he wasn't able to find hardware that was anything like Abby's equipment.

"She probably had it custom-made for her," Tim said with a groan. "Or got it from one of her eccentric friends."

"Abby has eccentric friends??" Tony exclaimed. "Who'd have thought it??"

"Can you check Abby's computer files, Palmer?" asked Gibbs.

Jimmy turned pink. "Uh, I'm not really good with computers, like McGee is. I'm good at Googling, but…"

"Abby should be back in a few hours, right?" said Tim.

Ducky looked troubled. "I'm afraid we shouldn't wait for her. We don't know what the long-term effects of the shrink ray are…"

Gibbs' three agents sat down, in despair. "Look at it this way, Ziva," said Tony. "You can save a bundle by just shopping in the toy stores for Mossad Barbie outfits."

"But what if I do not _want_ to look like every other 4-centimeter-tall woman?" Ziva pouted.

"You would still have to hem the outfits a lot," Tim added. "Barbie clothes are built for much taller dol—women. And then there's the bust measurement."

"What _about_ the bust?!" Ziva demanded.

"How do you know so much about Barbie clothes, Mc…I can't think of a good word. Sorry."

"At least you'll look better dressed as G.I. Joe than I will, Tony," Tim sighed.

"Yeah, probably. You might try the Raspberry Rumtart line. It'd look cute on you. Ah, crap. I'm sick of this. Let's work together and solve this."

"Did I not say the same thing?" Ziva head slapped him.

He ignored her. "Together, the three of us can work Abby's computer. Here's how we'll do it…"

- - - - -

_3:14 p.m.:_

Soon Tony, Ziva and Tim were at Abby's main computer, having been carried there by Gibbs, Ducky and Jimmy. Ducky and Jimmy then left the room to work on the problem in Autopsy, not willing to say that they were doing so in order to voice their worries with each other over the likelihood of reversing the effects. Gibbs took his car to wait for Abby at the courthouse, to speed up her return.

"I'll search the computer directories," said Tim. "Heaven only knows what she might have named the file, so let's look first under _modules.._no, _attachments."_ Sitting on the keyboard and turning his head up and down, far left and far right, he could just make out what was on the screen. "Guys, move the mouse to the left…little more…_there!"_

Tim jumped onto the _enter_ key. The _search files_ box came up. He then hopped from key to key, laboriously entering the search term, and then it was back to the _enter_ key. He watched the screen scroll high above his head with rapid-fire entries as it searched thousands of files.

But it didn't find anything that looked right, so he tried another search term, and then another. Tony and Ziva struggled to push the mouse along the mouse pad at his commands. Tim grew weary over hopping and decided to just walk from key to key, although it was much slower. Still, it required strength to push down on the keys. At one point his head swam as he straightened up, and then he toppled over.

"McGee!" Ziva cried, and ran to him.

"I'm okay," he said, putting his head between his knees. "Just…a little dehydrated, I think."

"You are doing the hard, physical work. Let me take your place for awhile."

"I don't know that you have enough mass to push down on the keys, Ziva."

"Then let _me_ do it," said Tony. "If you die on us, Probie, Gibbs will blame me, and we can't have that."

"But—"

"But nothing. You just tell me what to do, and I'll be the key monkey for awhile. Why are we using the mouse, anyway? Can't most of what we need be done with the _control_ and F keys?"

"Yeah, I guess," Tim admitted. "But they have to be hit simultaneously, so that means two people…"

"I will be the second person," said Ziva. "If I do not have the mass, then we can go back to pushing the mouse."

Tony gave her a hand up onto the keyboard. Tim watched the screen and called out to them what they needed to do.

"That's _it!"_ Tim said at last. "That's the equipment!" A graphic of the long-handled, rust-colored attachment was on the screen; Abby's margin notes scribbled around it. Tim ran to the mouse and pushed it with all his might, watching the cursor trail down the side menu of help topics. He left-clicked on _operation._

He left the cursor on the elevator and now and then left-clicked while reading the text on the screen. "We can do it!" he said at last, as he followed the process. It had originally been intended as a way of making things too large for a microscope slide smaller. While it didn't come right out and _say_ that objects could then be enlarged, it seemed that this was doable.

"The only problem," said Ziva, "is that we are too small to operate the equipment."

Tim sat down with a sigh. _Just when we were really working well together…_

Pulling out his phone, Tony called Ducky. "Need your help and Palmer's in here," he said. Ending the call, he smiled at his teammates. "Sometimes, you have to call in the grown-ups."

- - - - -

_4:25 p.m.:_

Again using the systems of cell phones and earwigs, the miniature agents were able to direct Jimmy and Ducky in disassembling the microscope attachment and reassembling it with the ray set on _increase_ instead of _diminish._ "Are you sure this will work, Timothy?" Ducky said worriedly, when it was done. "Perhaps we can find a…fly or a spider to test it on."

"Oh, no you don't!" said Tony. "No giant bugs! Test it on _me_ first."

"_I_ shall be first," said Ziva.

"_My_ discovery," said Tim. "_I'm_ going first."

Ducky shook his head. "It's far too risky to test on a human. I think we should—"

"I want to go first," said Ziva, "because my teammates, who normally fight like cats and pigs, have worked so hard together on this. I am honored to work with them. I want to take the risk of going first."

Tony didn't correct her jumbled adage. "You're okay, Ziva," he only said. But when Jimmy angled the ray to focus on the table, he pushed her aside and bounded into the beam.

"Hey!" Tim said, as a growing Tony nearly flattened him and Ziva.

"It works!!" Tony crowed, hopping down off the table. "Er…" Ducky and Jimmy still loomed above him; Jimmy almost twice his height. "Great," Tony growled. "I'm a hobbit."

"Technically speaking, Tony; hobbits have hairy feet," said Jimmy. "Do you—"

"_Mister_ Palmer," Ducky sighed. "Give Tony another dose of the ray."

And so Jimmy did, and Tony was quickly of normal size. He looked at the doll-like Ziva and Tim, still on the table. "Aw, you guys are so _cute!_ I just want to cuddle you." They ran from his reach.

"No playing," Ducky scolded. "All right, Jimmy; let's restore Ziva and Timothy to full size and be done with this."

- - - - -

_5:26 p.m.:_

Gibbs arrived with Abby, who looked stressed out. "Sheesh! You guys just _had_ to plow ahead with your case! You couldn't wait just a couple of hours for me to get out of court! Well, I'm glad to see that you're back to…normal…?"

"Er, well, we did the best we could with the calibrations. We're only about two centimeters off," said Ducky.

"Which I think is _really good_, considering we could have been half a meter off," said Jimmy, laughing nervously.

Abby and Gibbs walked slowly around Tony, Tim and Ziva, who were all about an inch taller than they had been at the start of the day. "Um…it's cool, really!" said Abby in false cheer. "I like it!"

"Translation: We look idiotic," Tim sighed, aware that the cuffs of his pants now exposed his socks.

"Better than being half a meter taller," said Gibbs.

"Or you could have become hobbits!" Abby laughed.

"Imagine that," said Tony.

"From now on, Abby, we shall leave the lab work to you," said Ziva. "Come on, team; I shall buy us dinner." Linking her arms in Tim's and Tony's, she led them out.

-END-


End file.
